


glorious as the sunrise

by SenEolas



Category: Irish Mythology, Oidheadh Con Culainn, Ulster Cycle
Genre: Death, Grief, Loss, M/M, The Death of Cú Chulainn, everybody is sad, it's just sad, literally just angst, not particularly shippy but they love each other, vaguely suicidal vibes here and there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:13:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29380458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenEolas/pseuds/SenEolas
Summary: All stories end. All heroes fall. And forgotten among those glorious deaths are the ones who are left behind to tell the story.Drawing on the Early Modern version of The Death of Cú Chulainn ('Oidheadh Con Culainn').
Relationships: Cú Chulainn/Láeg mac Riangabra
Kudos: 7





	glorious as the sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when the entire group chat is crying about Láeg and Cú Chulainn. 
> 
> For further tears, I might recommend '[An Early Modern Melancholy](https://finnlongman.com/2021/01/31/an-early-modern-melancholy/)'. Direct quotes from the text in this fic are from Finn's translation (which is, in general, to blame for this).

They were still children when it started, or maybe teens, newly aware of the giddy, gleeful glory of riding to a fight at each other’s sides and letting blood bind them ever closer together. _Inseparable,_ the Ulaid called them, and— _troublemakers the both of them,_ when they thought they weren’t listening, or _bound to break their mothers' hearts,_ which everybody had known from the start.

As they got older it didn’t fade, that giddiness, but age tempered it, made something more circumspect of them both, though they put on a show of rashness and still up and down the country there’s men who’d swear they never looked before they leapt. They looked – but they leapt anyway, side by side, one hero’s tale for the both of them.

And now here they are, at the end of it all.

It’s not a bad injury. Not enough to kill a man, but Láeg reels backwards anyway, reins slipping between his fingers as he clasps his shoulder. When he lifts his hand it’s bloody, and the hit’s the worse for being the first he’s taken in a battle like this, a sign that their luck’s turning.

“I’m hit,” he says, unnecessarily; Cú Chulainn’s already taken the reins with his spare hand, and as soon as they can stop the horses safely he’s done so.

“Go home,” he says, white-faced, drawn, tight in a way he never is before a battle because this is his element. He thrives on the chaos and the violence but now – “Go home, Láeg.” Even as he speaks he’s pressing cloth against the wound, made nursemaid by fear.

“It’s a scratch,” says Láeg, though the pain’s bone-deep and he feels weak with it. “What kind of friend leaves the first time he’s injured?”

“The one who does as he’s told,” says Cú Chulainn, already binding the injury with swift, efficient movements. “If I had my way there’s not a man among them who’d ever draw blood on you for as long as I live. But now that they have I can only try to stop it happening again. You have to—”

“I’m staying.”

“Láeg…”

“And if you’re wounded? What then? Am I to leave you here to fall alone, when I could be here to help?” Falling in battle is one thing, an inevitability – they’ve felt it always, looming on the horizon, but their heartbeats have ever been bound to each other and he’d always thought that when they fell it would be side-by-side, as with the rest.

“As my charioteer you’re bound—”

“You know full well I’ve never obeyed an order that didn’t suit my will.”

“Then do it for me this once.” Cú Chulainn tucks the end of the cloth under the edge of the makeshift bandage and gives his handiwork a critical glance. The pain is already receding now the bleeding’s staunched, but Láeg’s arm feels weak, poorly suited to driving. “The last order I’ll ever give you. After this you’ve no master. No one to tell you what to do.”

“Don’t.” He doesn’t want to be cut loose. Can’t fathom a life alone, bereft of the figure who has always given it meaning. “If you mean to release me from my duties, that’s one thing, but I’ll not have myself freed by your death. And if you truly wish me gone, then I’ll go – but it’s a shameful thing for me to abandon you now, and a cruel thing for you to insist on it.”

His companion’s eyes have a sadness in them. “You are my closest friend,” he says, “and you’ve long bound your fortunes with mine—”

“And never have I regretted it.”

“My fortune’s on the turn.”

“Then I should fall with you.”

“Láeg…”

“Don’t ask me to go,” says Láeg, his voice cracking. “Please.”

Cú Chulainn rests his hand on the bandage. “I will avenge this,” he swears. “They’ll hear of it across Ireland, how I repaid them for your wounding, and they’ll know there was never a warrior in all of history with a charioteer as loyal as you – nor will time ever see your like again. We’ve not parted or quarrelled since the day we bound ourselves together on this path and by the gods my people swear by I’d not ask you to go now but out of love for you, that you will not fall here today.”

“Perhaps I want to,” Láeg says. “Perhaps that is the path I’d choose if you would only give me the choice.”

He thinks – though he can’t be sure – that he sees a tear glittering in Cú Chulainn’s strange eyes. He thinks there’s a moment of hesitation there, such that he’s never seen before, before the hero says, “You have another path to walk,” and he knows he won’t be permitted the easy glory of dying. “Somebody has to tell Emer and Conchobar and Conall what happened.”

Long has he played the messenger. Long has he walked as go-between, as mediator, from one to another, and shaped with his words the story of Cú Chulainn. But this is one story he would not tell. “They warned me,” he says numbly. “The youths at Emain Macha, for all I thought it mockery at the time – they warned me I’d be alone by the end of this.”

“Don’t,” says Cú Chulainn, and it’s _his_ voice that’s shaking now. “Don’t tell me that, because the thought of it…”

“And all the pain it causes you is the pain I feel now to leave you.” Láeg takes Cú Chulainn’s hand, the one that rests still on his bandaged wound. Both their hands are sticky with blood. “I can’t walk away like this,” he says, and presses a kiss to the inside of his companion’s wrist. “I can’t abandon you and all that I am to take shelter like a maiden. My place has always been beside you.”

Cú Chulainn shivers at the brush of his lips, but his face is set. “If you’ve ever loved me—”

“Would you wound me a second time?” interrupts Láeg. “You know well that I do.”

“If you’ve ever loved me,” he repeats stubbornly, “then you’ll go, so that at least I may go to this fight in the assurance that you’re safe, and take some comfort in that.” With his free hand he clasps Láeg’s neck, bringing him forward so that their foreheads touch, their breath mingling. “Please. I’d have no one break it to Emer but you.”

Láeg closes his eyes. Feels the warmth of Cú Chulainn’s skin against his. Breathes in, and then out, until he trusts his voice enough to speak.

“There’ll be nothing to tell her,” he says. “You’ll go yourself, explain how you won, and she’ll tire of yet another victory tale.”

He doesn’t pull back to see if Cú Chulainn smiles. He doesn’t think he can bear it. “I’d have you as the prophet of my life, if I could,” says Cú Chulainn. “You’ve always told of kinder futures.”

He’s a better liar than the druids and a gentler oracle than the women. “If you listened to me you could live them.”

“We both know I was never built for that.” His kiss is brief, searing, painful as a shard of glass through the heart. “Now go. This isn’t your fight.”

So Láeg goes – but not to Ulster and his final duty, for he’s a mind to know if the story to be told is really the one he fears, and a will to make it otherwise, if he’s half a chance. He takes himself instead to the edge of the battlefield, out of danger, where he might watch the violence being done, and though he’s watched Cú Chulainn fight before there’s something different about it this time. Perhaps it’s the fact that he’s alone amidst his enemies, Láeg’s own absence conspicuous, and the men of Ireland jeer that he’s been abandoned. Perhaps it’s the look on his face, where his usual vicious delight has hardened into something sterner that speaks more to duty than to joy.

Perhaps it’s that Láeg knows, for all his determined optimism, that he’ll never watch him in battle again.

Long have they been bound together, hero and charioteer. Since their infancy they’ve not parted, save for when Cú Chulainn crossed the seas to learn from Scáthach, and even then he left with the promises to return. They’ve shared their joys and their pains, their victories and their losses; they have spent their days at each other’s sides and their nights closer still. And now he feels that bond like some síd-touched chain of the Otherworld, tangling their souls in their bodies, so that every time he sees Cú Chulainn stagger under a blow he feels phantom bruises bloom across his own skin, and when his blood sparks red-hot against his pale body, Láeg checks his arm for cuts and is almost perplexed to find none.

He can’t leave. Not when his heart, his body, his very being belongs to the slender figure on the battlefield. He’s no one without his companion. A mirror image reflecting empty space, a shadow cast by a dream.

So he stays until it’s over, until the survivors flee and the battlefield becomes a wasteland and a banquet table for carrion. He sees the Líath Macha fall, the shining grey now matted with blood; sees the shattered remnants of the chariot that was once his joy. He makes his way across the bloody ground until he finds Cú Chulainn, because whatever ending this story is to have, it hasn’t come yet.

He doesn’t miss the way Cú Chulainn’s face brightens at the sight of him, though quickly he tries to hide his joy behind concern.

“You should have left,” he says, but it lacks strength, and no wonder – he’s losing blood in a steady stream, until the clear pool beside him is cloudy with it. “I told you to leave.”

“And I told you I’ve never obeyed an order I disagreed with.” Láeg crouches beside him, begins to bind the worst of his wounds as though he can patch up the holes in his universe, though every rending of Cú Chulainn’s flesh tears away a little part of him.

“You’re a stubborn creature,” says Cú Chulainn, with a small smile.

“So speaks the authority on these things,” answers Láeg, and is rewarded with a tiny laugh from his companion, though it subsides into a wheeze of pain. “You routed them, then. I told you that you would.”

“Perhaps.” Cú Chulainn’s gaze is fixed on something beyond him. He turns to see an otter emerging from the bloodied pool, but far from fleeing in search of cleaner waters it laps at the fresh blood, its tongue scarlet with it. Cú Chulainn fumbles for a stone – ever and always his most faithful weapon – and throws it, making a cast at this final enemy of his which would have been no disgrace on the battlefield: it hits its target squarely, and the creature falls dead amidst the gore.

Láeg looks away, back to his task. “See?” he says, forcing strength into his voice. “There’s life in you yet, little Hound. Enough strength to take on the men of Ireland, and revenge yourself on them as surely as you revenged yourself on this poor beast.”

“I don’t think so.” The effort seems to have exhausted Cú Chulainn. He sags, and when he offers Láeg a smile it’s wan and unconvincing. “Ever the words of prophets catch up with me.”

“What do the druids know?”

“That to kill a hound was to be my first deed and my last.” There’s a strange kind of stillness in him now, alien to a body that never stops moving. “Until I saw this water-dog dead by my hand I have to say I wasn’t sure that they were right, but now it comes back to me. It seems clear enough that I’ll kill no man nor beast after this.”

“They’re wrong,” Láeg insists, his stubborn heart resisting all attempts to break it in two, clinging to hope like a shield. “They’re wrong. You’ve more yet to do. You – I’m not ready for you to die.”

Cú Chulainn reaches up and cradles his face with a bloody, shaking hand; wipes the tear from his eyes with his thumb. “Oh, Láeg,” he says, and for a moment it seems that might be all he manages, his breath a rattling gasp in his throat, but he gathers his strength and says, “Will you take me with you to that standing stone up there? I’d rather die with a view than here among the mud.”

“You’re not dying,” says Láeg, but his tears spoil the conviction of the statement.

“We’ll go there,” Cú Chulainn tells him, “and you’ll give my weapons to me, so that the men of Ireland might think me still living, and leave my body intact. And then Conall—”

Conall the avenger. Conall the victorious. Conall who will be the one to repay this violence, because Láeg hasn’t the strength or the stomach for it, though in this moment he has the heart to suit, full of rage and pain and grief tangled together into a fury that would lend him a warrior’s bloodlust. Here with Cú Chulainn’s blood on his hands and faced with his own impotence, he could take a hundred heads, a thousand, but for the emptiness of it. Because vengeance will not repair the piece of him that will be lost here.

“I’ll tell Conall,” he says, already numb, and he helps Cú Chulainn stagger to his feet and together they stumble to the standing stone. And then he can go no further, every part of him rebelling against the duties that would make this real, because the moment he places Cú Chulainn’s weapons in his hands he’s accepting the fact that he’s adorning a corpse.

Cú Chulainn leans against the stone, one hand pressed against his heart where his wounds still weep with blood despite Láeg’s bandages. “It’s funny,” he says, “that after everything it turns out my heart’s only flesh and blood.”

But it isn’t funny at all, for Láeg feels that flesh rending in his own chest, an echo and an answer. “Flesh and blood and stubbornness and fury,” he says, “and as strong as iron.”

“As breakable as bone,” says Cú Chulainn, and in his eyes there’s something Láeg’s never seen but when he knelt beside the bodies of those he loved: a helpless grief, a futile love. Keening without voice. “If I’d known, perhaps I’d never have done any of it.”

Láeg picks up his fallen weapons. “I don’t think so,” he says, and though his hands are heavy and his soul unwilling, he passes him first the shield and then the spear. “It always seemed you thought mortality a fair price to pay.”

He’d thought he agreed. But now he sees the cost is too high for any to willingly pledge themselves to such a debt.

Cú Chulainn smiles. “A short life but a glorious one,” he says, and takes his sword from Láeg. Unsheathed, it glimmers blood-red in the light of the dying sun, the carnage around them reflected in its metal. He regards it, and then looks back at his most faithful friend: “It was a glorious one, wasn’t it?”

“As the sunrise,” Láeg replies, but his words are half a whisper and already lost, as Cú Chulainn leans his head back against the pillar and lets his eyes flicker shut and finally, finally goes still.

Láeg feels it, the moment the chain between them snaps – feels a pain like shattering ribs radiate through his chest. He crumples to his knees, and for a moment his vision is white, seared empty, so that he thinks the gods have taken pity on him and allowed him to die here at Cú Chulainn’s feet. _Inseparable,_ said the Ulaid, so it would be fitting, to make their final journey beyond death at each other’s side, as they made every journey before it. But then his sight clears and he blinks away tears to see that nothing’s changed: still the carnage of the battlefield before him, still the standing stone, still the brave bold beautiful body of Cú Chulainn, armed even in his final rest.

He allows himself a moment of collapse. A moment longer to breathe through the pain of his loss and his injury. And then he sees in the distance a shadow – the Dub Sainglend, though he’d thought both the horses lost. She’s wounded, a shattered spear-shaft still protruding from the wound, and Láeg sees the pain in her and knows the kinder path, for he’d seek it for himself, if anyone would let him. But Cú Chulainn was right – the news must reach Emain Macha somehow, and there are no others to take it.

He gets to his feet. Walks to the Dub Sainglend; it’s easier if he doesn’t look back at the figure he’s leaving behind him. Gentles her with a touch and a word and draws out the spear so that he might pack the wound. “I’m sorry,” he whispers to the mare, as he mounts, and feels her pained shift beneath him. “I’m sorry.”

And like a messenger and his steed the two pick their way across the battlefield, bloody and grieving and moments from collapse. Only when they reach the edge does Láeg pull her to a halt, and look back.

From a distance, Cú Chulainn might still be alive – upright and proud with his weapons at the ready. But the circling crows say otherwise, the crows and the dull ache of loss inside him and his memories that have the truth of it. The chief of valour and arms, glory and prowess, protection and bravery, has fallen; all that’s left is his silhouette on the hillside and his story in Láeg’s keeping. What a weight it is, to bear that tale, to speak of glory, when all that he wants to say dies in his throat now that there is nobody to say it to.

Láeg has never been alone before.

He’d sooner rest, let himself sleep beside the road, pray to whatever gods are listening that he doesn’t wake. But for all the order ill-suits him he has one last duty to perform, to take his grief to Emer and let her share in it, and he won’t fail Cú Chulainn now. He turns away from the figure on the hilltop, pointing the Dub Sainglend towards Emain Macha, and lets the mare’s wisdom find the path to take him home, his tears marking the mournful road behind them.

And the rusted sun slips below the horizon, the bloody light of the sky fading into night.


End file.
